1. Field
Inventive concepts relate to memory scheduling methods and/or methods of operating memory systems, and more particularly, to memory scheduling methods and/or methods of operating memory systems, which perform efficient garbage collection.
2. Description of Related Art
A memory system (for example, a flash memory system) is a nonvolatile memory device, and is widely applied to universal serial bus (USB) drives, digital cameras, mobile phones, smartphones, tablet personal computers (PCs), memory cards, solid state drives (SSDs), etc. In flash memory devices, a read/write unit and an erase unit differ, and thus, a memory operation is managed by a flash transition layer (FTL), which may include firmware.
In the flash memory system, data is written in a block (for example, a free block) having an erase state, and in writing data, when there is no free block or the free block is small, garbage collection may be performed for securing one or more free blocks. However, as the number of valid pages of at least one victim block for which garbage collection is to be performed increases, the efficiency of the garbage collection is reduced.